Fortuitous News

Phil Carinhas is giving two seminars on Green Computing in the next month.

On Jan 22 2008: Austin-San Antonio Chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers at 11:00, San Marcos, TX. See http://www.txaee.org/calendar.htm

The second talk, on Feb 7 2008, is at the Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM, a group dedicated to data center managers and engineers). That talk will be held at 11:30am at Marie Callender’s Restaurant, 9503 Research Blvd, Austin TX. There is a $15.50 charge for lunch.

This talk is about ways to reduce and control the overall energy footprint of a computing environment:

Abstract: Green Computing

Despite the huge surge in computing power demands, there are many technologies and methods by which significant savings can be made. This talk focuses on techniques a typical organization can use to reduce their energy footprint while maintaining required levels of computing performance and capacity.

Dominique Heger is designing an MPI extension for the Flexible File Systems Benchmark (FFSB). The extension will allow FFSB to be utilized in cluster and GRID environments. FFSB reflects a cross-platform filesystem performance measurement and stress-testing tool that allows quantifying IO performance based on actual workload profiles that mimic production environments. Dominique Heger designed FFSB V1 back in 2000, and over the years, Josh Jacobs (MIT), Sonny Rao (IBM), and Jose Santos (IBM) have made substantial contributions in regards to the design, scalability, development, and functionality of FFSB.

We have a new whitepaper by Dr. Heger entitled: Capacity Planning: A Necessity for Green Computing. Green computing is a very hot topic these days, so I think you’ll find this and interesting addition to the discussion of energy conservation, computing, and all things green.

You can find the paper here.
In addition, have a green computing guide coming out soon so stay tuned!

Fortuitous is excited to announce today’s newly forged alliance with Xensource (http://xensource.com).

Fortuitous will assist XenSource with their clients who need capacity planning and performance design for their virtualization conversions and projects. Fortuitous sees it’s alliance as a strategic enabler for large virtualization clients who need assurance, design, and scalability.

For more information please contact http://fortuitous.com

We’ll be giving a talk on Grid Node Classification in Houston, TX on March the 8th. We will discuss Monte-Carlo Techniques for node classification. We will also talk about research in Cellular Automata for node classification in grids and clusters. This will be hosted by the CMG.org Southwest regional meeting.
http://regions.cmg.org/regions/swcmg/index.html

Dominique Heger will give a talk on Parallel Filesystems on Jan 11, 7:00pm at San Antonio Linux Users Group.

For more information on location and details, please see http://satlug.org

We have a new ZFS primer! ZFS is an exciting new filesystem from the Solaris and OpenSolaris crews.

ZFS highlights:
· Provable data integrity
· Detects and corrects silent data corruption
· Immense capacity (128-bit file system!)
· Simple administration
· Performance
· RAID-Z

Please check it out at http://fortuitous.com/en/resources/primers/

-Phil

CMG 2006 in Reno was a huge success. Phil and Dom each presented a paper. Meeting with some of the brightest people in the performance and capacity planning area not only helps us to augment our own network, but also gives us new ideas on how to get customers better focused on the importance of having a sound design for any IT project that they may be involved with.

Dominique has written a new IO Prioritiziation primer.
Check it out !
http://fortuitous.com/en/resources/primers/

Its now official!

We have 2 papers accepted in this years CMG International conference in Reno Nevada:

http://cmg.org/cgi-bin/agenda_2006.pl?action=more&token=6011

and

http://cmg.org/cgi-bin/agenda_2006.pl?action=more&token=6044